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A day after his inauguration as President of Mexico in 2012, Enrique Peña Nieto announced a Pact for Mexico – a slate of institutional reforms for education, energy, fiscal policy, telecommunications, banking and antitrust. These initiatives, enacted over the next several years, were designed to alleviate a host of historic problems that had held back Mexico’s economic development. By 2017, although the President’s popularity was at an all-time low, these initiatives were beginning to affect the economy. The salient questions were (1) whether they would really work and (2) whether the political order would shift radically to the left in 2018.

For the past few decades, Australia has dealt with the benefits and costs of repeated mining booms—inflation, a housing bubble, a current account deficit and growing dependence on China. Between 1996 and 2007, however, Australia had most of these issues under control and grew at impressive rates, becoming one of the richest of developed countries. Yet competitiveness in its non-mining sectors declined. Since the financial crisis, additional challenges associated with climate change, minerals taxes, migration, fiscal deficits and an currency fluctuations have complicated the issues facing both Labor and Liveral administrations, with a very thin majority. Meanwhile, Australia's non-mineral competitiveness continues to recede.

America's Budget Impasse draws on a series of recent government documents to explore America's economic performance through 2016, tax policy under President Bush, economic-policy decisions - especially the stimulus and the resulting performance under President Obama, the Senate and House budget proposals in 2016, and the new budget proposals of President Donald Trump in May of 2017. The case is designed to understand Republican ideology associated with tax cuts, to evaluate the effectiveness of tax cuts, to assess the stimulus and the effects of the fiscal and tax multipliers, and to assess President Trump's proposed budget cuts and tax cuts.